An Effectiveness Study of Online Advertising Models
Juan E. Gilbert, Ph.D. Yuehua Lin, M.S.
Auburn University Auburn University
Human Centered Computing Lab Human Centered Computing Lab
Computer Science & Software Engineering Computer Science & Software Engineering
107 Dunstan Hall 107 Dunstan Hall
Auburn, AL 36849 Auburn, AL 36849
+1 334 844 6316
Abstract: The Web has become an important advertising medium and online advertising
has been growing rapidly. However, research on how to create effective and innovate
online advertising models and how to evaluate the effectiveness of online advertising
models has not kept pace with the widespread of online advertising. This research aims to
propose and implement two creative online advertising models: the background sound
model and a hybrid model. An experiment was conducted to measure the effectiveness of
the background sound model and the hybrid model by comparing them to the banner,
pop-up and pop-under models. A set of metrics were defined to measure advertisement
recall and recognition as well as branding efficacy.
The emergence and ubiquity of the Internet has proven itself of having huge
potential as an advertising medium. Online advertising has been the fastest growing part
inside the whole advertising industry. As an interdisciplinary research field, Online
advertising needs support from different disciplines such as business, psychology and
computer science. Unfortunately, the research on online advertising is still remarkably
scarce. Rare conclusions can be found to answer questions like “What ad form will be the
most effective and what should be in the ad.” The current limitation of online advertising
may be concluded as:
(1) The form of online advertising is still insufficient. As is known, the widely
used online advertising models are only banner, pop-up and pop-under. The effectiveness
of these models are still not satisfatory to advertisers.
(2) Although there are various evaluation activities involved in compaigns and
experiments, it is still difficult to determine the performance of current online advertising
models. More and more evaluation experience is still required to establish universally
accepted and well approved measurement methodologies and techniques for online
(3) Most research studies tested the effectiveness of a single model. Little
research has been down on evaluating and comparing two or more online advertising
models. To help advertisers to select appropriate and effective advertising models, it is
necessary to carry out comparison studies among different online advertising models.
Therefore, it is time to introduce more creative components such as sound,
animation and streaming media to online advertising, by which designers can design and
implement new online advertising models. Also, because our knowledge of what factors
can affect the success of online advertising is limited, it is necessary and valuable to
conduct experiments to evaluate the online advertising models. The findings will be
useful to establish standards and guidelines of online advertising.
This paper aims to present two new online advertising models: a background
sound model and a hybrid model. In the background sound model, sound is the only
vehicle to convey advertising information. In the hybrid model, advertising information is
conveyed via the combination of banner, pop-up, pop-under and background sound. In
the empirical part of this research, five online advertising models (banner, pop-up, pop-
under, background sound and hybrid) were tested to see their effectiveness on advertising
recall and recognition as well as brand recall and recognition. How these models annoy
the Web users was also measured in the experiment. From this empirical study, the
performance of banner, pop-up, pop-under, background sound and hybrid were evaluated
2. New Online Advertising Approaches
Currently, the most common online advertising models are banner, pop-up and
pop-under. A banner is typically a static or dynamic image in the Web page; a pop-up is a
new displayed browser window that appeared when the Web page is loaded; a pop-under
is similar to a pop-up except that it always hides behind the loaded Web page. Although
these models are used widely, they are still considered ineffective because of their
disadvantages. For example, banners are easy to ignore; pop-up and pop-under
advertisements are often perceived as an annoying and intrusion. With the emergence of
new technologies such as streaming media and rich media, integrating sound and multiple
media into online advertising is a mainstream. The following sections discuss the new
online advertising models: the background sound model and the hybrid model.
2.1 The Background Sound Online Advertising Model
Considered one of the most important and widely used media for communication
and information dissemination, sound is incorporated into online advertising to build a
new online advertising model: the background sound model. The background sound
model tries to take advantage of human hearing to subliminally appeal to viewers. This
model plays advertisements in the form of streaming audio while users are viewing Web
pages. In general, the embedded audio ad begins to play as soon as the Web page loads.
Compared to other online advertising models, background sound ads have the following
(1) Sound can convey information efficiently. In other words, sound can convey a
vast amount of information at a relatively high speed. A landmark study by Chapanies
found that modes of communication that included voice were much faster than those that
did not. In the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) community, there have
been a number of compelling demonstrations of the power of voice communication
(Zhang, Wolf, Daijavad, and Touma, 1998).
(2) Sound allows human computer interaction to occur in a natural and emotional
way to communicate. As a medium of sound, audio has the ability to emotionally involve
customers with advertising (Gusco, 2001). By providing a rich audio environment in
which to engage, entertain and interact with customers, audio advertising could be a
better way to communicate a message to a user.
(3) Streaming audio has two advantages over streaming video. First, streaming
audio needs considerably less bandwidth to achieve high quality than streaming video.
Secondly, users can access streaming audio even when they are working, playing games
or surfing the net. This facilitates the design and implementation of subliminal
advertising, which is a technique of exposing consumers to advertising stimuli without
the consumers having conscious awareness. Because customers are believed to decode
the information and act upon it without being able to acknowledge a communication
stimulus, subliminal advertising can minimize its annoyance.
(4) Background sound ads generally don’t occupy any screen space. Therefore,
Web pages have more space for Web designers to design visually appealing Websites. At
the same time, sound can convey a considerable amount of information without wasting
any screen resource.
According to the above analysis, background sound is a promising model for
online advertising. With the widespread of streaming media technology, background
sound advertising will be more accepted and applied.
2.2 The Hybrid Online Advertising Model
The hybrid model combines different individual online models. It can mix banner,
pop-up, pop-under or background sound. The goal of the hybrid model is to get optimal
combination of different online advertising models so as to take advantage of the strength
of these models and overcome the weakness of them individually. Obviously, this model
has its distinct advantages:
(1) Any given Web site could feasibly employ combined model advertising where
specific Web pages use specific models. For example, a pop-up ad is not appropriate for a
Web page that has a pop-up window as its content. Otherwise, it is possible to cause
confusion in the viewers because it is hard to distinguish which pop-up window is the
content or the ad within a glimpse. The relative weighting of each individual model is
adjustable, and can be modified during campaign or experiment to increase hybrid
(2) The hybrid model accommodates more interactivity and technological
flexibility. The hybrid model generally combines different online advertising models,
which expands its capacity to accommodate different types of objects such as rich media
and digital creative technologies. An optimal combination of more than one model should
be able to maximize the effectiveness and minimize the annoyance of online advertising.
Defining the background sound and hybrid advertising models alone is not good
enough. The models must be evaluated through experimentation to determine their
3. Experiment and Analysis
To discover the performance of the background sound and the hybrid models by
comparing them to the banner, pop-up and pop-under models, an experiment was
conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of these five models. It was expected that the
background sound and hybrid models could have better recall and recognition
effectiveness than the banner, pop-up and pop-under models.
In this research, advertisements were designed for a wireless service provider:
CDS. It is a fictitious brand that can guarantee the experiment participants have no
awareness of this brand prior to this study, so we can eliminate the influence of
awareness difference. Five online advertising models were implemented: banner, pop-up,
pop-under, background sound and hybrid. Each model contains four advertisements for
CDS. These four advertisements convey the same information, although they are in
are also located on the same Web pages in different models. Therefore, we can guarantee
three identities among these five models. (1) They convey almost the same information
such as product/service category, the brand, and advertising message. Therefore, all
models delivered the same advertising contents. (2) They are embedded in the same Web
pages in a Web tutorial. (3) The total exposure of each advertisement is the same. These
identities minimize the differences caused by other factors like the advertisement
contents. Figure 1 contains a sample illustration of the banner advertising model used in
this experiment. Figure 2 contains a sample illustration of the pop-up advertising model.
Figure 3 has a pop-under advertisement. Because pop-under advertisements appear
behind the main browser window, it can only be seen in the task bar at the bottom. When
the main browser window is closed, the pop-under advertisement becomes visible, see
figure 4. The background sound advertisement has no visual appearance, it operates
using sound. The hybrid model uses combinations of all of the models.
Figure 1: Illustration of a Banner Advertisement
Figure 2: Illustration of a Pop-up Advertisement
Figure 3: Illustration of a Pop-under Advertisement
Figure 4: Illustration of a Pop-under Advertisement closing the main browser window.
Participants and Procedures
Participants for this experiment were Computer Science students enrolled in an
introductory programming language course. They could be considered as Web users with
similar experience. They were divided into five groups randomly and these five groups
were involved in the test of the five ad models respectively. The participants who did the
advertisement experiment and gave their feedback were also called respondents.
using a Web tutorial. The participants were not aware that the experiment was an online
advertising experiment. They worked alone to read this tutorial during 30 to 40 minutes,
which displayed or played the ads in one of the models. After they finished their reading,
they answered “yes”, they were asked to answer questions on a questionnaire related to
the advertisements. Upon completion, they were told not to talk to their classmates about
the experiment to make sure that all participants had an equal amount of knowledge of
the experiment coming into it.
Today, there is an increasing usage of metrics on consumer’s attitude, branding
effect and advertisement recall and recognition in evaluating online advertising
effectiveness (Higie, Sweall, 1991; Sukpanich, Chen, 1998). To evaluate the
effectiveness of ads in different models, three metrics were employed: Ad
recall/recognition, Brand recall/recognition and annoyance to this experiment. Ad
recall/recognition is the major metric of this experiment; brand recall/recognition is a
subset of ad recall/recognition for evaluating the branding effects; Annoyance is a general
attitude for the online advertising models, which is also an important factor affecting the
ad effectiveness. To evaluate this, we define annoyance as a measure. The following
definitions were used:
Ad recall/recognition: measure the extent to which respondents can recall or
recognize the contents of the ad. It is determined by product or service, brand and
message recall and recognition. Message recall and recognition measures the extent to
which respondents can recall or recognize message other than the product/service and
Brand recall/recognition: measure the extent to which respondents can recall or
recognize the brand name, and it is decided by both brand recall and brand recognition.
Annoyance: measure the level of annoyance of each Ad model. It is the
percentage of respondents that feel the ads are annoying. In other words, it is the
proportion of annoyed respondents versus total number of respondents.
To evaluate these measurements, a set of questions was designed for interviewing
participants in the form of a questionnaire, see Table 1.
Table 1 The Question Design of Measurement
Product/service recall Do you recall what product/service was advertised? If
yes, can you write down the product/service?
Brand recall Do you recall what brand was advertised? If yes, can you
please write down the brand name?
Message recall Do you recall what else the advertisements said about the
Product/service Do you recall seeing/hearing any ad for wireless service?
recognition Select “Yes” or “No”
Brand recognition Do you think which brand was advertised on the
Message recognition What do you remember about the ad(s)? Select the
messages advertised from a list of messages.
Annoyance If you were describing these ads to a friend, would you
say these ads are…Select all that apply from a list of
impressions like “interesting”, “informative”,
“confusing” and “annoying” as well as “no opinion”.
3.2 Results and Discussion
All the respondents’ feedback data were collected and used to calculate the values
of the measurements. All values of the measurements were calculated as percentages of
the sample that recall or recognize the specific contents of the ads and feel annoyed by
the ads. The following are the equations.
Product/service recall = number of respondents who recalled the product or
service / number of respondents.
Brand recall = number of respondents who recalled the brand / number of
Message recall = number of respondents who recalled the advertising message /
number of respondents.
Product/service recognition = number of respondents who recognized the product
or service / number of respondents.
Brand recognition = number of respondents who recognized the brand / number
Message recognition = number of respondents who recognized the advertising
message/ number of respondents.
Ad recall/recognition = (Product/service recall + Brand recall + Message recall +
Product/service recognition + Brand recognition + Message recognition) / count of the
total recall and recognition measurements.
Brand recall/recognition = (Brand recall + Brand recognition) / count of the
brand recall and recognition measurements.
Annoyance = Number of Respondents Annoyed / Total Number of Respondents.
In this case, count of the total recall and recognition measurements is 6 and count
of the brand recall and recognition measurements is 2. Figures 5, 6 and 7 show the results
of ad recall/recognition, and brand recall/recognition as well as annoyance measurements,
Figure 5: Advertisement Recall/Recognition
According to Figure 5, the ad recall/recognition values of banner, pop-up and
pop-under were 50%, 41% and 46% respectively, while those of background sound and
hybrid are 75% and 70%. In other words, 46% of the respondents could recall or
recognized the ads in the banner, pop-up and pop-under models, about 73% respondents
could recall or recognize those ads in the background sound and the hybrid models.
These experiment results reflect the background sound ads and the hybrid ads are more
likely to be recalled or recognized than the banner, pop-up and pop-under ads. The
background sound model has the highest ad recall and recognition effectiveness, 75%.
Therefore sound is possibly playing an important role in increasing ad recall/recognition.
Figure 6: Brand Recall/Recognition
As far as branding efficacy, the background sound model and the hybrid model
are also more effective than the banner, pop-up and pop-under models. According to
Figure 6, while the brand recall/recognition values of banner, pop-up and pop-under were
20%, 14% and 26% respectively; the brand recall/recognition values of background
sound and hybrid were 42% and 40%. In other words, about 20% of the respondents
could recall or recognize the brand name, in the cases of banner, pop-up and pop-under.
About 41% of the respondents in the cases of background sound and hybrid, could recall
or recognize the brand name. Therefore, we could summarize that the background sound
and the hybrid models were twice as effective as the banner, pop-up and pop-under
models in recalling and recognizing brand.
Figure 7: Annoyance
The experiment results of annoyance indicated that banner ads were the least
annoying, only 40% respondents thought they were annoying. However, the annoyance
values of pop-up and pop-under are close, which are 86% and 88%, respectively. The
annoyance value of background sound is 83%, which means that 83% of the respondents
thought the background sound ads were annoying. The hybrid model has the highest
annoyance value: 100%. All respondents thought hybrid ads were annoying, which
suggests this model should be used where the users’ interests are known and relate to the
advertised product or service.
In summary, compared with the banner, pop-up and pop-under models, the
background sound and hybrid models were more effective in ad recall and recognition as
well as brand recall and recognition. Background sound was the most effective model
among these five models. It implies sound is an effective vehicle to convey advertising
information online. By taking advantage of sound, background sound advertising appears
to be more powerful than banner, pop-up and pop-under advertising to build brand
awareness that favorably influences purchasing behaviors. Its ability to embed typical
sounds like a cell phone ring into the ad gets the viewers’ attention and helps them to be
aware of the advertisements. Only more annoying than banners, background sound ads
were not as intrusive as expected. But, to minimize the annoyance is critical in applying
sound to online ads because they are very easy to be suppressed. As observed, some
respondents turned down the speakers when they heard the ads. The hybrid model had 4
different ad models: banner, pop-up, pop-under and background sound. Although the
contribution each ad form made to ad recall and recognition was not determined in this
experiment, it still implies that the combination of different ad models improves ad
effectiveness in recall and recognition. However, all respondents felt hybrid ads were
annoying. The reason is possibly that it is very difficult for respondents to get use to
different ad formats in a short period of exposure.
To avoid high risk of being suppressed, the background sound and hybrid ads
should be targeted appropriately and relevant to viewers’ interests. It is also important to
keep the advertising message close to the content of the Web page. These are all keys to
successful online advertising.
Two major works have been done in this study. First, two new online advertising
models (the background sound model and the hybrid model) were addressed. Secondly,
an experiment was conducted to compare the effectiveness of these five online
advertising models: banner, pop-up, pop-under, background sound and hybrid.
Several interesting conclusions can be reached from the results and observations
made during the experiment. The background sound ads and the hybrid ads were more
effective in ad recall/recognition and brand recall/recognition than the banner, pop-up and
pop-under ads. Banner ads had the lowest annoyance value, the pop-up, pop-under,
background sound and the hybrid ads all have high annoyance value. This effect is
probably due to the fact that banner ads are most commonly used in practice. Therefore,
the participants were use to seeing and ignoring banner ads. So it suggested the hybrid
model and the background sound model should be used where the viewer’s interests are
known and the content of the ads relate to these interests. Otherwise, these advertising
models can become a deterrent. In general, the results of this study support the
background sound advertising model and the hybrid advertising model as promising
alternative models of online advertising if they are used carefully. This was a small
controlled study conducted to compare three existing online advertising models to two
new advertising models. The results are reported here, but more extensive studies should
be conducted with a larger participant base to further support the findings of this study.
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